Rewriting the Lehman Post Mortem

Asset bubbles for the rich and a welfare boom for the rest does not a recovery make.

By

Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.

Sept. 20, 2013 6:52 p.m. ET

Five years after Lehman it pays to rethink why we had a financial panic and why the recovery has been so slow. The credit crisis, which was already under way before Lehman, was a crisis of a single asset class, Triple-A mortgage derivatives, held by banks with large amounts of borrowed money, which they acquired amid a government-sponsored housing boom.

Yet the government's own investigating commission would later write that, even as many subprime loans went bad, the Triple-A tranches held by banks mostly "have...